Servetus and Calvin

Servetus and Calvin - A Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the Reformation

Some years ago I was led to make a study of the Life and Writings of Spinoza, and took considerable pains to present the gifted Jew of Amsterdam in such fulness to the English reader as might suffice to convey a passable idea of what one of the great misunderstood and misused among the sons of men was in himself, in his influence on his more immediate friends and surroundings through his presence, and on the world for all time through all his works. This study completed, and leisure from the more active duties of professional life enlarging with increasing years, I bethought me of some other among the sufferers in the holy cause of human progress as means of occupation and improvement. Spinoza led, I might say as matter of course, to Giordano Bruno, with whose writings I was familiar, and who was Spinozas master, if he ever had a master. But having, at a former period, undertaken x to edit the works of Harvey for the Sydenham Society, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood having become renewed matter of discussion with medical men and others, labourers in the field of general literature, I was turned from Bruno to Servetus, as the first who proclaimed the true way in which the blood from the right reaches the left chambers of the heart by passing through the lungs, and who even hinted at its further course by the arteries to the body at large. Of Servetus at this time I knew little or nothing, save that he had been burned as a heretic at Geneva by Calvin; and of his works I had seen no more than the extract in which he describes the pulmonary circulation. But meditating a revision and prospective publication of the Life of Harvey, with which I had prefaced my edition of his works, I went in search of further information concerning the ingenious anatomist who had not only outstripped his contemporaries, but his successors, by something like a century in making so important an induction as the Pulmonary Circulation. Nor had I far to go. In the ample stores of the British Museum Library I found a complete mine of Servetus-literature, and with access to the Christianismi Restitutio, as reproduced by a learned physician, Dr. De Murr, and other works of the unfortunate xi Servetus, I encountered not only the physiologist already known to me, but the philosopher and scholar, the practical physician, freed from the fetters of medival routine, the geographer and astronomer, the biblical critic, in days when criticism of the kind, as we understand the term, was unimagined, and, alas for him! the most advanced and tolerant of the Reformers,that sacred band to which Servetus by indefeasible right belongs. Luther, Calvin, and the rest repudiated the discipline and most of the outward rites and shows of the Roman Catholic Church; but they retained the most abstruse of her creeds. Servetus went at least as far as they in the rejection of externals; but, appealing to the scriptures of the New Testament, he satisfied himself and dared to say to the world that some of the fundamentals of Christianity as formulated by the Church of Rome, and acquiesced in by the Reformers of Germany, had no warrant in the teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth. Rejecting, as he did, the whole of the post-apostolic dogmatic accretions of the Church of Rome, Servetus is the source of the more reasonable service we are now permitted to render, andstrange conjunction!through his disastrous intercourse with Calvin, in no small measure the original of the free enquiry that is leading on to conclusions yet xii uncontemplated as to mans relations to the Unseen and the Eternal. The life and labours of the man of whom so much may be said can never be otherwise than interesting to the world. Nor is it in his life only that Servetus has been influential. His death has, perhaps, been even more influential than his life; for when his pyre began to blaze, the beacon was lighted that first warned effectually from the shoals of bigotry and intolerance on which religion misunderstood has made shipwreck so long. The custom of consigning heretics, as dissidents in their interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures were called, to death by fire then began to fall into abeyance; princes and chief magistrates ceased from assisting at autos-da-f as edifying spectacles; and persecution to less terrible conclusionsimprisonment, banishment, fine, and social ostracismhas been coming gradually, however slowly, to an end. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 54226
Author: Willis, Robert
Release Date: Feb 23, 2017
Format: eBook
Language: English